Dec. 28, 2016 "Running as the thinking man's sport": Today I found this article by Gretchen Reynolds in the Globe and Mail:
Running seems to require a greater amount of high-level thinking than most of us might imagine. The sport seems to change how the brain works in surprising ways, according to a new report.
The study, published this month in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that the brains of competitive distance runners had different connections in areas known to aid in sophisticated cognition than the brains of healthy but sedentary people.
The discovery suggests that there is more to running than mindlessly placing one foot in front of another.
Scientists have known for some time that mastering certain activities demands considerable thought and consequently can alter the workings of the brain.
Playing a musical instrument, for instance, requires refining a variety of fine motor skills, while also engaging memory, attention, forward planning and many other executive functions of the brain.
So it’s not surprising that past brain-scanning studies have found that expert musicians tend to have greater co-ordination between areas of the brain associated with different kinds of thinking, as well as sensory processing and motor control, than do people who have never picked up a bassoon or other instrument.
Similarly, in neurological studies of athletes whose sports stress hand-eye co-ordination, strategizing and mental attention, such as badminton players and gymnasts, the athletes generally displayed greater interplay between parts of the brain devoted to cognition and mental focus than did the non-athletes.
But running is not usually considered to be cerebral. Most of us learned to run as toddlers, perhaps falteringly at first but progressively with more confidence, and afterward mostly stopped thinking about how to run, at least consciously.
So we would probably not, as a rule, expect running to activate parts of the brain that control advanced cognition.
But researchers at the University of Arizona suspected that running might in fact be intellectually demanding and could affect thinking patterns in people who run, even when they are not running.
To test that idea, the scientists recruited 11 competitive, collegiate male runners and another 11 young men who said that they had not exercised in the past year. The researchers used questionnaires and mathematical formulas to quantify the men’s physical activity levels and estimate their aerobic fitness.
(They said they focused on men primarily because they were concerned about controlling for the effects of the menstrual cycle on the bodies and brains of young women.)
Then they had each volunteer lie quietly for six minutes in an MRI scanner while the machine measured levels of activity in their brains.
The researchers were particularly interested in any co-ordinated activity between different parts of the brain, as indicated by areas of the brain that were simultaneously lighting up in similar ways. Such synchronized activation is thought to indicate that parts of the brain have developed functional connections, even if they are physically separated from one another.
It turned out that the runners’ brains displayed a number of different connections than did the brains of the sedentary young men, and those connections involved areas of the brain needed for higher-level thought.
In particular, the scientists noted more connectivity in the runners than in the inactive men between parts of the brain that aid in working memory, multitasking, attention, decision-making and the processing of visual and other sensory information.
There also, interestingly, was less activity among the runners in a part of the brain that tends to indicate lack of focus and mind wandering.
In essence, the runners seemed to have brains in which certain cognitive skills, including multitasking and concentration, were more finely honed than among the inactive men. Earlier studies in older adults have found that similar connections are associated with improved memory and cognition as people age.
“To me, this suggests that running may not be such a simple activity after all,” says Gene E. Alexander, a professor of psychology, neurology and physical sciences at the University of Arizona. He co-led the study in conjunction with David Raichlen, a professor of anthropology at the university.
Instead, running seems to be a kind of mobile math puzzle. “It requires complex navigational skills,” Alexander says, “plus an ability to plan, monitor and respond to the environment, juggle memories of past runs and current conditions and also continue with all of the sequential motor activities of running, which are, themselves, very complicated.”
Given running’s mental demands, he was not surprised, he says, that the runners’ brains indicated differing thinking patterns than in the sedentary young men.
Of course, this type of study cannot prove that running actually caused the differences in the men’s thinking, only that runners had certain patterns of thought.
Likewise, it is unclear whether running, alone, has such effects, or if other endurance sports, including cycling and swimming, would be associated with similar brain connections or whether people who are not college-aged and male would respond in the same ways.
The scientists also did not test their volunteers’ cognition, so they could not say whether the differing thinking patterns among the runners were linked with being smarter.
But Alexander and his colleagues hope to perform experiments in the future that could tell us more about how running and other physical activities actually alter thinking patterns and whether, as we age, we might be able literally to run away from mental decline.
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Jul. 17, 2016 "So, you think you know how your brain works?": I found this article by David Kates in the Edmonton Journal:
You’ve probably found yourself in situations where you felt like either your memory or your perception was somehow distorted. Maybe you’d confess to having bought into a conspiracy theory, entertained a superstition or even spotted faces in random objects.
If so, don’t feel bad. It’s just how the brain works – at least according to Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist at Cardiff University in Wales. In his new book, The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To (HarperCollins, 2016), he enumerates some of the ways our brains succeed in tripping us up.
The book is an effort to demystify the brain for the average non-scientist. It’s an exploration of the great quirks and imperfections that are hallmarks of the body’s most misunderstood organ, offering a perspective that could only come from many years (in Burnett’s case, two decades) spent studying the brain. It’s kind of like how familiarity breeds contempt, although he doesn’t exactly see it that way.
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“I think it’s a healthier approach, to (admit) that the brain isn’t perfect,” says Burnett. “It’s brilliant, but it’s got plenty of bugs and glitches, and these things affect everyone all the time.”
Ultimately, Burnett hopes that taking an irreverent attitude towards the brain will allow us to be less intimidated by it, improving our understanding by bringing it back down to earth.
“I don’t think scientists have the right to tell people that their brains are out of bounds, because what is more ours than the actual grey matter in our heads?” says Burnett.
The book goes into considerable detail on a variety of subjects, but here are five things the brain does that Burnett finds equally amusing and perplexing.
Superstition
The brain is constantly looking for patterns in things, whether or not they actually exist.
Consequently, it often leads us to draw connections between disparate events, forming the foundations for many of our superstitions and conspiracy theories.
“The brain just doesn’t like randomness and uncertainty; it will do everything it can to rule that out,” says Burnett. “So we get things that make no sense, weird theories like, ‘Don’t throw salt over your shoulder on a Thursday.’ And most of these things, as they’re picked up, they tend to be passed along.”
No, that’s not actually Jesus on your toast
One particular quirk, similar to the brain’s constant attempts to string together unrelated events to form patterns, is the fact that it’s constantly on the lookout for faces.
“There is a temporal-cortex region of the visual system responsible for recognizing and processing faces,” Burnett writes, “so anything that looks a bit like a face will be perceived as a face.”
Consequently, we’re often seeing faces where, in reality, there are none. “We tend to see faces everywhere – in punctuation, in bits of toast, clouds, kettles and sinks, cutlery and bits of grass laying on the floor,” says Burnett. “It’s really harmless, but it can also be quite distracting. It’s not a very good use of our time.”
Your memory is unreliable and biased
“People have this idea (of memory) that it’s sort of just like computer memory – information goes in, it’s stored and then it’s retrieved in exactly the same state as it was placed there,” says Burnett. The reality, he says, is far more complicated.
“It seems like a seamless memory system, but it’s vulnerable to influences,” he says. “So if we ask leading questions, the memory can be altered.” The classic example would be of a witness being interrogated by a skilled lawyer in a courtroom.
Memory is also informed by our egos. “We tend to adjust memories so that they’re more flattering to us, because our self-worth, our self-regard is important to us,” says Burnett. “Some people genuinely believe they caught a fish that big, even when they didn’t.”
Lizard brain, meet Neocortex
Burnett talks about how our lower-order “lizard” brain, which controls our most basic functions such as breathing, balance and coordination, is occasionally at odds with the more advanced neocortex.
“You’ve got these two bits of the brain – one really old, one really new,” he says. “One’s set in its ways, one’s thinking and planning and flexible. It’s kind of this odd couple and they don’t get on, but they’re both stuck in your head forever, arguing constantly about who does what and how it’s done.”
A perfect example of this dynamic at play is motion sickness on an airplane, where the brain is receiving conflicting sensory information about whether you’re in motion or stationary. “The neocortex knows what’s happening – it understands the concept of vehicles and the ability to be in motion without moving your body.
But the primitive brain doesn’t know that. It has no clue and it has no system to be corrected. It just assumes it’s been poisoned, so it makes you throw up.”
Praise makes us feel pretty good, but criticism makes us feel really bad
You might notice that you react more strongly to criticism than to praise. According to Burnett, this is because our brains respond differently to each.
“Nice things, such as receiving praise…produce a neurological reaction via the release of oxytocin,” he writes, “which makes us experience pleasure, but in a less potent and more fleeting manner.”
Being criticized, mocked or insulted, however, is perceived by the brain as a threat, which induces a stress response and the release of cortisol. “It makes us experience an actual physical reaction that sensitizes us and emphasizes the memory of the event.”
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